PREFAB FRIDAY: MinArc’s M3 House

LA-based architecture firm MinArc is customizing prefab homes at prices that remain surprisingly economical. With their new M3 House they will be able to design and deliver an all inclusive package (minus the land and the foundation) that gives their clients a site specific house which also makes the most of the best qualities of factory built prefab: including high quality control of assembly and use of all natural materials. The total cost for the inclusive package will run clients roughly $200-$250 per square foot (including permitting).

What’s more incredible about M3 House is the limited amount of time spent on-site for final assembly. Once the foundation is complete, M3 House can have your 2,500sq foot home ready for furnishing in only 8-10 hours. You just need to allow for one additional day to tie in your electrical and plumbing utilities.

We learned about MinArc at CABOOM this past weekend, when their sustainable Greenfield House (stay tuned for more information) was featured on the Home Tours. It didn’t take us long to discover that their venture into green housing lead them to the development of, M3 House LLC. M3, which stands for Modern, Modular, and MinArc (minimalist-architecture) is MinArc’s direct response in recognition of the growing demand for more affordable housing. M3 House looks to the latest green building materials that will provide a quality product, while utilizing the latest technologies available for green living. Environmental aspects of a M3 House will include options for solar power, rainwater harvesting, onsite generator, biolet off-grid toilets (which are all self contained and efficient), use of naturally renewable materials, energy star appliances, on demand water heater, geothermal heating and cooling, thermal mass flooring with radiant heating, energy efficient lighting, and green roofs.+ CABOOM 4+ MinArc+ M3 House (coming soon)

The colored renderings are previous derivations of custom pre-fab designs from M3 House.

Thank you all for discussing the elephant in the room: price. I've been interested in the Rocio Romero plans (they offer an 1150 sq ft house starting at $42,115) and the BoKlock housing partnership of IKEA and Skanska (though I'm not sure what the price is for these). Anyone else know of pre-fab that looks good and is low-priced?

Brian– Do some more reading. An LVL at 40K gets you walls and not much else. Although I admire the design and the opportunity for sweat equity, it's far from what I would consider a prefab. I believe the LVL's done professionally are coming in at around $200 psf without land.
And bill@objetdesign.com is thinking in the right direction. As a former builder, I can tell you that just because you can doesn't mean you should!
-Bobby

I've been reading up the whole Modern Prefab movement for a while now, and the price range seems to be quite dramatic. You can find an affordable LVL home starting at $40K with about 1400 sq ft of space (http://www.rocioromero.com/LVSeries/LVL.htm); or one of the Michelle Kaufmann's designs can set you back between $150-$175/sq ft at the factory (http://www.mkd-arc.com/whatwedo/mksolaire/cost.cfm); and then you see these higher end ones at over $200/sq.ft. They all claim to be green and sustainable, so how can we compare as a consumer?
At the end, we all have to consider the ROI. It's quite easy to find an old crappy house in CA or the Northeast for $500K with little land. If you have to justify the investment, you will have to build a much bigger house, which defeats the purpose of lowering our carbon footprint as many of you are considering. So what is the right thing to do? I personally would love to build one of these green prefabs, but it's going to be a luxury after adding up everything. Is it even worth it?

To Lloyd Alter, Jackie and all others,
The 'Qunta Monroy' project in Chile is costing $7,500 per 3 level concrete block unit. See:, and:. Granted... this is connected housing. So what would this design cost as a stand alone dwelling... 3 or 4 times that cost ? Well... that's still way less than $200 - $250 per square foot. And if these designs were regrouped into a single level dwelling... what could that cost ? (Think 3 levels conjoined into a 'C' shape, leaving an interior courtyard.) Still... scandalously less than $250 per sq. ft., I'd imagine ?
I spend half the year on a somewhat poor Carribean Island called Vieques, Puerto Rico. Many locals here build their own houses. Poured concrete slabs, floors and roofs are the norm, with concrete block infill. A fellow New York City / Vieques resident just built a 16' x 30' x 18' foot tall concrete block house here, in the hills of Monte Carmelo, for $12,000 !!!!!!! This price inclues the cost of a half width interior Mezzanine (bedroom area) made out of treated wood. (The Kitchen and Bathroom are under the mezzanine, allowing a 16' x 15' by 16' double height living/dining area.There's also a cool roof deck above, accessed by steps from the Mezzanine.)
COME ON FOLKS ! This blind belief in house having to cost $200 to $250 per square foot is ridiculous.
And to Jackie... architectural fees are based upon the projected cost of construction, right ? And... many architects charge way more than 5% - 20%. Apparently, only when Architects make more money because they've figured out how to make splendid designs cost far less than $200 to $250 per square foot... will architecturally designed houses becomemuch more cost effective. Whatever.

So do those of you who question the objections to the price think that this price is perfectly reasonable and affordable? Or perhaps your thinking is along the lines of the "Design within Reach" idea in that it's accessible at all? It feels like there's two different languages of numbers going on here.
I have another question, if it can be built in a couple of days, how long after the order is placed does it take to get to those final couple of days?

mscot hit the nail on the head. In LA, $500,000 is entry level, but that's all about the land. Here in the Midwest, I am quite certain I could have built a comfortably appointed, sustainable, 2,500 sqft. house for well under $500,000 including the cost of land it sits on.
I still love the idea of prefab and modular design. I love it because it potentially improves consistency and real evaluation of the green qualities of the building. I'm betting that the high prices are largely due to using high volume production methods to create only a small volume of houses.

How many of my fellow Inhabitaties out there think this is just another glorified overpriced shoebox… That’s all... Nothing ingenious… Nothing interesting... Not really even worthy of debate?
If you think $200-$250/SF is “affordable”, where ever you live (be it LA, NY… wherever), then you’re out of touch with middle-America. Yes, houses in DC, Cali, & NY sell for over $500/SF… But they don’t cost over $175/SF to build (w/ profit margin built in).
In most of the US, the typical factory built home costs on average $55/SF to fabricate.
But unit fabrication is only part of the big picture. Articles like this one make it sound as if you can just buy one of these cookie cutters and plop it down… Walla. Put your furniture in… HOME!
On average, delivery of modules costs about $5/mile per lorry…. Every foot in width over 12’ costs an extra buck a mile. It’s still cheaper to stick-build houses, but prefab & modular have come a long way over the past ten years. For some reason, though, most of the prefab/modular homes are still built with wood, which is the worst material to use for a long list of reasons (including susceptibility to termites & rot). Sustainably harvested, reclaimed… That makes it more “Green”, but its still wood.
The idea of using SIPs sounds cool, but from experience I can tell you, it’s not as affordable as it should be and the limitations in site flexibility frustrate me.
Architects and Architecture: Architects don’t make bank. Architecture is one of the most misunderstood and under appreciated (and underpaid!) professions these days. Everyone likes to say “my architect…”, but when it comes time to pay the fees, the average client shortchanges their architect. I don’t have a peer or colleague that hasn’t been ripped off by 50% of their clients. It’s because we live in a world where everyone wants more than they can afford, and everyone thinks they are due something better. Ok, well… It’s worse in the US. I’m a proud American, and I’ve been abroad in Europe and the UK a good portion of the past year… And I gotta say, it’s us. Everyone likes to blame it on our bonehead president, but once you step outside of our SimCity, you quickly realize that we really are living in a clouded world. Every region has their issues, but when it comes to housing in developed countries, only the British are more backwards. The thing that we have in common with the Brits is a lot of poor and a lot of rich. The poor get cardboard, and the rich get high-design prefab with helicopter pads.
But for every misunderstood architect that gets ripped off by an unrealistic client, there are two architects whose clients rip them off because the architect did not listen or relate to the client’s needs. I’ve been there and am guilty myself. We’re designers… Just as a soldier is programmed to kill before he is killed, us designers and architects are trained to make our mark wherever we are given an inkling of a chance. The idea in our mind is that clients hire architects and designers for their vision, and thus it is our job to educate them with our vision. Only problem is that they didn’t make us take economics back in design school! And visions can get out of hand! I was lucky, my mother came out of the last bit of the depression era, and to this day if I spend more than three bucks on a meal she labels me frivolous and wasteful (it’s amazing the great meal you can still get at a Cuban cantina in Miami for $2.95).
I recently closed my Washington, DC studio in order to step away from my life-passion of architecture and focus on design of what I call AASDAwannabe (Accessible, Affordable, & Sustainably Designed Architecture that aspires to Be).
For the past six years my client work has focused on the category known as “Champagne wishes in a Styrofoam cup”… basically high-design want on a shoestring budget. (I prefer a china cup that can be rinsed and reused, but more on that could take this already lengthy commentary into a whole ‘nuther discussion.) My clients came because they heard that I was bent on providing affordable and sustainable high-design to the average you or me. Washington, DC is one of the most expensive cities in the US, and everything we’ve designed has been built between $100-$150/SF (for any of ya that think it should easily happen for under $125/SF in a city like DC or LA… uhmm time to wake up). How and why? Because we stopped thinking like architects, and befriended every engineer and tradesman that we could. We were on site in the mornings and in the studio in the afternoons. Ahhh… So, THAT’s how a door is actually set… and Ahhhh… So, THAT’s why it’s better to undersize an HVAC unit, than oversize it!
Architects these days are paper-architects, and THAT is why everything you see on Inhabitat looks like a glossy rendered shoebox. I was visiting Columbia’s School of Architecture recently (one of the top in the world), and asked a few students – about to graduate – how many of their classmates could actually build their designs, or draw a CD set that their design could be built from. I was expecting them to say 30-40%. The answer was unanimous… 3-5%! After walking through the studios, I understood. Beautiful renderings. Spotted three physical study models in the whole school, and their model shop was a crying shame. Paper architecture.
Architecture came from the Architecton. When a mason derived a new construction detail, he wanted to document it… So he drew it. But we do it the other way around these days. We draw it and expect the builder to build it. Many times our designs don’t reference the proportion of that masonry unit, or it asks masonry to hang in mid air, instead of acting in compression, as it would like to be.
The designers don’t know enough about their materials and their details. THIS is why the mod trailers costs so much to build. I know a builder, building butt ugly (no designer) trailer looking panelized homes for the needy – for $18,000 - $23,000 a pop.
I’m currently challenging myself to design him a two bedroom, one bath AASDAwannabe prototype that he can build for 25 – 30,000 USD. In California terms, I guess that’s less than Less Than Zero.
If there are any architects, designers, engineers, or builders out there that are interested in joining my rebellious brainstorm, drop me a note >>> bill@objetdesign.com.
And stay tuned to see if we meet our goal*

How many of my fellow Inhabitaties out there think this is just another glorified overpriced shoebox… That’s all... Nothing ingenious… Nothing interesting... Not really even worthy of debate?
If you think $200-$250/SF is “affordable”, where ever you live (be it LA, NY… wherever), then you’re out of touch with middle-America. Yes, houses in DC, Cali, & NY sell for over $500/SF… But they don’t cost over $175/SF to build (w/ profit margin built in).
In most of the US, the typical factory built home costs on average $55/SF to fabricate.
But unit fabrication is only part of the big picture. Articles like this one make it sound as if you can just buy one of these cookie cutters and plop it down… Walla. Put your furniture in… HOME!
On average, delivery of modules costs about $5/mile per lorry…. Every foot in width over 12’ costs an extra buck a mile. It’s still cheaper to stick-build houses, but prefab & modular have come a long way over the past ten years. For some reason, though, most of the prefab/modular homes are still built with wood, which is the worst material to use for a long list of reasons (including susceptibility to termites & rot). Sustainably harvested, reclaimed… That makes it more “Green”, but its still wood.
The idea of using SIPs sounds cool, but from experience I can tell you, it’s not as affordable as it should be and the limitations in site flexibility frustrate me.
Architects and Architecture: Architects don’t make bank. Architecture is one of the most misunderstood and under appreciated (and underpaid!) professions these days. Everyone likes to say “my architect…”, but when it comes time to pay the fees, the average client shortchanges their architect. I don’t have a peer or colleague that hasn’t been ripped off by 50% of their clients. It’s because we live in a world where everyone wants more than they can afford, and everyone thinks they are due something better. Ok, well… It’s worse in the US. I’m a proud American, and I’ve been abroad in Europe and the UK a good portion of the past year… And I gotta say, it’s us. Everyone likes to blame it on our bonehead president, but once you step outside of our SimCity, you quickly realize that we really are living in a clouded world. Every region has their issues, but when it comes to housing in developed countries, only the British are more backwards. The thing that we have in common with the Brits is a lot of poor and a lot of rich. The poor get cardboard, and the rich get high-design prefab with helicopter pads.
But for every misunderstood architect that gets ripped off by an unrealistic client, there are two architects whose clients rip them off because the architect did not listen or relate to the client’s needs. I’ve been there and am guilty myself. We’re designers… Just as a soldier is programmed to kill before he is killed, us designers and architects are trained to make our mark wherever we are given an inkling of a chance. The idea in our mind is that clients hire architects and designers for their vision, and thus it is our job to educate them with our vision. Only problem is that they didn’t make us take economics back in design school! And visions can get out of hand! I was lucky, my mother came out of the last bit of the depression era, and to this day if I spend more than three bucks on a meal she labels me frivolous and wasteful (it’s amazing the great meal you can still get at a Cuban cantina in Miami for $2.95).
I recently closed my Washington, DC studio in order to step away from my life-passion of architecture and focus on design of what I call AASDAwannabe (Accessible, Affordable, & Sustainably Designed Architecture that aspires to Be).
For the past six years my client work has focused on the category known as “Champagne wishes in a Styrofoam cup”… basically high-design want on a shoestring budget. (I prefer a china cup that can be rinsed and reused, but more on that could take this already lengthy commentary into a whole ‘nuther discussion.) My clients came because they heard that I was bent on providing affordable and sustainable high-design to the average you or me. Washington, DC is one of the most expensive cities in the US, and everything we’ve designed has been built between $100-$150/SF (for any of ya that think it should easily happen for under $125/SF in a city like DC or LA… uhmm time to wake up). How and why? Because we stopped thinking like architects, and befriended every engineer and tradesman that we could. We were on site in the mornings and in the studio in the afternoons. Ahhh… So, THAT’s how a door is actually set… and Ahhhh… So, THAT’s why it’s better to undersize an HVAC unit, than oversize it!
Architects these days are paper-architects, and THAT is why everything you see on Inhabitat looks like a glossy rendered shoebox. I was visiting Columbia’s School of Architecture recently (one of the top in the world), and asked a few students – about to graduate – how many of their classmates could actually build their designs, or draw a CD set that their design could be built from. I was expecting them to say 30-40%. The answer was unanimous… 3-5%! After walking through the studios, I understood. Beautiful renderings. Spotted three physical study models in the whole school, and their model shop was a crying shame. Paper architecture.
Architecture came from the Architecton. When a mason derived a new construction detail, he wanted to document it… So he drew it. But we do it the other way around these days. We draw it and expect the builder to build it. Many times our designs don’t reference the proportion of that masonry unit, or it asks masonry to hang in mid air, instead of acting in compression, as it would like to be.
The designers don’t know enough about their materials and their details. THIS is why the mod trailers costs so much to build. I know a builder, building butt ugly (no designer) trailer looking panelized homes for the needy – for $18,000 - $23,000 a pop.
I’m currently challenging myself to design him a two bedroom, one bath AASDAwannabe prototype that he can build for 25 – 30,000 USD. In California terms, I guess that’s Less Than Zero.
If there are any architects, designers, engineers, or builders out there that are interested in joining my rebellious brainstorm, drop me a note >>> bill@objetdesign.com.
And stay tuned to see if we meet our goal*

Eric said: 'As pointed out, relative is the word here. $250 a sqft in California is almost free. Well, almost.'
Only if you include the land. Housing in LA starts around 500k but that is for a house AND land. In california you're paying for the land your house is on first, and the house is secondary.
Loyd said 'Bring it to LA or New York and the price will double.'
See my above comment. The entire point of pre-fab housing is to make housing cost-effective. Why would you want to live in a cookie cutter house and still pay 3 to 4 times more than if you built it from the ground up?
Sure you can say "when you build walls to R30 you pay twice what an R12 wall is." but we don't know how these houses are built so there's really no way to apples to apples this comparison.

Where did this obsession about price per square foot come from? do you care how much your car cost per pound? Price is a direct result of the quality of the materials used to build- the sixty dollar per square foot house is going to be big (less per square foot, more air) vinyl and not particularly sustainable. Bring it to LA or New York and the price will double. If you use sustainable wood windows you are paying four times as much as you do for vinyl. If you put in radiant heat in gypsum cement you pay four times as much as you would for a forced air system. when you build walls to R30 you pay twice what an R12 wall is. If you put all of this into a small package you are going to find it just about impossible to get below 200 per foot anywhere, let alone LA. I would be surprised if the 930 square foot unit came in under 300 per foot- it has the same bathrooms, kitchens and fixtures as the bigger unit. The inane preoccupation with price per square foot is what drives the mcmansion business- it does not cost more to build big if you don't care what you build with and how you are going to heat or cool it long term. Get over it!

THE PRICE should be much lower becouse everything is produced in the workshop where you can have pretty much of a slim production like a Ford line. You dont waste materials, workconditions are as good as in any plant.
BUT also the modernism takes away all the complicated construction forms wich add to the price.
Only theese aspects should lower the price by at least 25% compared to site built.
So it becomes pretty obvious that somebody (the architect or the producer, or both)
take advantage of this in order to increase their benefits.

I think the pricing for contemporary prefab homes is pretty high. The $500,000 I referred to is pretty straightforward. I took the $200 per sqft and multiplied it by 2,500 square feet (not an unusual size for a house these days). That works out to $500,000. If you end up paying the $250 per sqft, you wind up at $625,000. The math I did was pretty simple. So that's where I got those numbers.
As for relative to what...that's compared to some quick and dirty math I did about new construction homes in my area. With land costs removed, the price per square foot was quite a bit lower. Granted, that's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but my own personal hope for prefab would be to see a much lower cost per square foot.

THE LOOKS ARE COOL, BUT WHAT ABOUT PRICES, M+M+M, SHOULD TAKE YOU IN APRE-FAB CONCEPT TO A BETTER PRICE FOR SQ. PLUS THE COST OF LAND, PLUS THE COST OF FOUNDATIONS.SINCERLY I THINK , ARCHITECS HAVE TO MODIFY A LOT THE CONCEPT OF --AFFORDABLE-- HOUSE. PRE-FAB + DESIGN + ARE PART OF THE EQUATION THEY MUST YHINK IN LESS PROFIT PER UNIT AND GO FOR THE BIG MARQUET. GO BACK TO BASICS.... REMEMBER LINE PRODUCTION , THE GREAT FORD MODEL T . THE GENIUS OF THE COUNTRY HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. JUST LOOK BACK TO JAPAN, CHINA, MALASYA ETC, ETC. RE--THINK THE CONCEPT AND GO FOR THE BIG SLICE. R.G.

Ritchie, as an architect interested in prefab who works on alot of multi family projects, I can tell you a few things that are factually incorrect about your comments.
First, you seem to imply that the projects shown costs as much as they do becayuse somehow architects are responsible and are trying to design expensive buildings so that we can charge more. That is almost laughable.
The issue is not that architects are "incentivised" to make things cost less. First, architects usually do not design for themselves- they design for clients. They usually are given a program by their clients. In the case of Prefab, Architects try to design to what the market will buy. Architects have no say on material or labor costs and these have been escalating sometimes 2005 in the last 5-6 years due to DEMAND and SUPPLY .
FYI_ Architects charge anywhere from 5 to 20 percent for SITE BUILT, depending on the level of detailing and documentation involved. Very rarely, when pricing a loxury project, with a big budget there is ususally a lot more detail and drawing involved you MAY get upwards of 20%, but. The great potential of prefab is that there are savings because what is charged is essentially a "repeat" fee, and the schematic/ design development design costs are minimum because they are like 20% of what a site built house would be, plus the same amount of construction administration.
Architects can only do so much. Certainly there should be incentives for developers and clients to invest in prefab and sustainable technology. There should definitely be regulation REQUIRING sustainable practices and inceptives like subsidies to owners who are willing to be the first to try the new technology.
Our field is heavily responsible in terms of liability- trust me that we do not get paid a huge sum when you consider the lamount of work we do, the liability involved and the insurance we have to carry.

I love the look! Also I am completely in accord with the green building/energy efficient thrust of this site.
Building costs for the projects offered here, however, are beyond consideration for those interested in 'affordable' housing. The square foot costs net of site shown in this example and others would likely appeal only to the wealthy, or to dilettanti interested in the latest faddish expression of their ego.
I'm a Dallas-based mortgage banker financing new construction, and a sometime builder. The majority of traditional stick-built housing and of those using energy-efficient, pre-built structural panels is completed at an actual cost of $45 - $65 per square foot of living area net of site. This price includes the cost of construction management and short-term financing for houses that are truly 'affordable' to those considered near-luxury homes.
Until pre-fab costs more nearly approach the level of site-built houses, projects like the one illustrated here will remain 'case studies'. That is to say they will make pretty illustrations on websites, and, will occupy only those with academic or non-serious interest; they have no meaningful impact on the wider construction community, the planning of typical homebuilders, nor will they deliver any significant benefits to our environment.

I agree with Bryce. Until Architects are incentivised to design great designs that COST LESS to build... projects will continue to cost way too much. Currently, Architects make more money by making projects cost more. Typically, they base their fee's on what the projected cost of building a project will be. If I'm not mistaken it's usually 20 to 30% of the projected total cost. It really seems as if 'Green' and 'Pre-Fab' are just handy new tools that enable this same, sad, process to continue. It's time for an upgrade. Maybe it's time for a flat design fee, and bonuses if the cost of construction comes in under budget ? Ditto for contractors.

Bryce -- You have made comments before about the pricing of pre-fab as being ridiculous. To what are you comparing it? Are you calculating in cradle-to-cradle lifetime costs, so that there is a direct comparison? Can you quote relevant sources? Just curious....
Likewise, MinArc -- being from LA, do you have any models that appear realistically sited in that urban context, wherein the city I know is getting densified with low- to medium-density condo tracts, not vacation homes in endless fields of open space. Do you have serious proposals on the boards for small apartment houses, with economical 850 to 1000 sq.ft. units?
Where's the common ground in economical pre-fab?

Is that true? $500,000??? If what you say is true how can that be thought of as affordable. I think perhaps pre-mass production version are that high but know one with that kind of money would invest in a pre-fab fast built home. That leads me to believe the cost is not that high.